Sumeet Agarwal

• sumeet.a@gmail.com
• github.com/sumeet

Coding and software engineering

• Polyglot up from x86 ASM to Haskell
• Expert in Rust, Python, Ruby, Go, JS
• Fast at getting up to speed with existing systems & reading code, productive on day one
• A clean and meticulous worker and well-experienced at planning and executing large-scale infrastructure migrations and refactors
• Product engineering: Project leadership, planning, communication flow, project estimation and technical mentorship
• Enthusiastic and heavy LLM user, but also skeptical and measured. I keep up with everything and I’m always evolving my workflows. At the same time very particular about code and architecture, especially where it matters most.

Experience

Sup, 2024 - current

Product 1: Sup.net, a programmable Discord-like chat app

• Built the programming language runtime on Rust + WASM + QuickJS, and designed much of the end-user SDK
• Built the chat input mechanism around a custom handwritten Markdown parser
• All around tasks including web frontend, web backend and React Native mobile frontend

Product 2: Bash.tv, a multiplayer coding agent crossed with Twitch

• Built the initial prototype of the app working by myself for a month, company eventually pivoted to this after the initial pilot seemed promising
• Built the coding agent, designed a “context compiler” infrastructure and a really cool in-app context viewer
• Lead on the agent, system prompt and context management

Contracting, 2018 - 2024

Pluralsight / DevelopIntelligence

Contract instructor, taught Intro to Golang courses as part of a company’s continuing education program

BestPracticer

Mentored 10 software engineers (including engineers from Strava and Vercel) between junior to senior level who wanted to level up their skills. I helped with either their day-to-day work or in learning new skills such as computer science, refactoring and software design, functional programming, C, Assembly, or whatever else they wanted to learn

theCoderSchool

Private 1:1 computer science / coding tutoring for middle school and high school kids, I still have 1 student who I’ve been working with for over 5 years

WealthConductor

Ported a comprehensive US tax law root-finding algorithm from Python to Rust over the course of a few months, and optimized the Rust port until it was 100x faster than the original

SeedTime

Rescued a gardening Kickstarter project and fixed their frontend and backend performance and quality issues, 1 week before their launch.

PropertyGuard

One-person engineering team for a product that helped HOAs and property managers to see if their properties are being rented on Airbnb, Vrbo, etc. Golang, Django, TensorFlow, and a lot of web scraping

Looka Logo Maker

Mostly Golang backend work on their branded Stripe PDF invoice product

New Ventures West

A new-age spiritual management training organization. Their go-to maintenance person for over 5 years helping them with a custom Ruby on Rails LMS they had gotten built by contractors

Programming language research

langjam 0001: Zac (first place winner)

Won a contest to create a programming language. This language is about self-modifying code. The contest theme was “first-class comments”, and the language has a special “comment” data type that is like a string that you can write to, and it gets rendered into the source file. It’s really cool, it’s like a cross between a REPL and a programming language.

• GitHub: github.com/sumeet/Zac
• YouTube: tinyurl.com/smt-jam1

langjam 0002: matcharoni (runner-up)

Not as strong as my first entry, but still managed to get featured in the contest video recap. It’s a language that’s all about pattern matching, and there’s some cool examples of using it to parse and solve Advent of Code problems

• GitHub: github.com/sumeet/matcharoni
• YouTube: tinyurl.com/smt-jam2

CodeMaestro

Spent 2 years developing a prototype for a visual programming language, a cross between Scratch, Vim and Rust

Remind, San Francisco, CA

Product and infrastructure engineer, 2015 – 2018

Worked on the Remind messaging platform, a messaging program connecting over 30 million parents, students and teachers in almost every school in the US. Led development on numerous products, including bulk administration tools for school and district leaders, and 2-way messaging between students, teachers and parents.

Devised several large-scale infrastructure projects, fixing performance issues unique to a high traffic messaging app with 30 million users, and implemented organization-wide changes to significantly reduce the app’s error rate.

Ruby, Go, Python, React, Node.js, RabbitMQ, Redis, PostgreSQL, DynamoDB, StatsD

SocialChorus, San Francisco, CA

Senior product engineer, 2015

Maintained a web-based employee outreach SaaS, used by very large companies like Coca Cola and Target, in an XP (eXtreme Programming) environment. Test driven development and daily pair programming.

Ruby on Rails, CouchDB, PostgreSQL, Backbone.js

Yelp, San Francisco, CA

Software lead, 2010 – 2014

Lead developer on Yelp’s consumer line of products, including Yelp Deals, Gift Certificates and food delivery. Worked on email deliverability, handling payments, large team project coordination, and pioneered more efficient testing and code organization methods.

Python, MySQL

Sogeti, Dayton, OH

Corporate IT, internal tools, 2009 – 2010

Worked on the in-house IT team of a 2000+ employee IT consulting firm based all over the US.

• Built internal tools like wikis and blogs, so different branches could share information with each other
• Administered Linux and Solaris servers
• Built an internal employee catalog, synchronizing data between Microsoft Exchange and Oracle E-Business Suite
• Implemented a web-based single site authentication system that worked on top of Active Directory
• Rebuilt the company website, which had previously been built in Microsoft FrontPage and maintained by a single developer, into a CMS which the marketing department could update themselves

Python, Django, PHP

Education and background

Boston University, Bachelors in Computer Science – Boston, MA, 2008

Pre-university accomplishments

• Worked with a team of volunteers to build VGMix, a popular web community where musicians shared music and feedback. MySQL, PHP, circa 2003 - 2006
• Had a complex patch accepted into Adium IM client for auto-away
• Managed and coded software for large (100+) IRC bot clusters
• Linux SysAdmin certification at age 14
• Learned to touch-type at 7, 100+ WPM by age 10
• Became proficient with MS-DOS at age 5 from watching my cousin

Other interests

Running, Zachtronics games, Advent of Code, Linux, Mac, Windows (I use everything), tiling window managers, literary fiction, Neovim, weird programming languages, linguistics